A photo posted on Twitter by Uber Entertainment's Chandana Ekanayake shows a t-shirt with a Half-Life 3 logo, saying: "All I'm saying is I saw this at a local game developer event worn by a Valve employee." Whether this is significant, or just trolling is not clear yet. The two hash tags he uses for this are #HalfLife3 and #ValveTrolling. Thanks Computer and Video Games.

Verno wrote on Dec 2, 2011, 14:30:I'm not going to argue it any more with you Dev, you're again taking something out of context (that story was about Gabe giving a long time employee time off when he had a life threatening illness) but let's put that aside. What do we get when HL3 comes out? I mean from you specifically, will you eat a shoe or something?

Its not just that one employee. He talks about how he worries about his employees dental health after one employee had to get a mouth guard, and how he he's worried that the release of portal 2 will by a Pyrrhic victory at the expense of stressing employees.

Here's some examples of quotes for you (complete with any appropriate links so you can check out sources to verify I'm not taking it out of context):

But, seriously, if fifty awesome people knocked on the door, weíd hire them all. We donít hire to specific positions, we hire to standards.

Emphasis added. I'll bold all gabe's words to separate them from the interviewer questions.

So, essentally you're saying that Valve needs autonomous developers.Yep. We donít really have titles here; people decide for themselves what their role should be. People self-organise here.

Thatís why Valve is organised to find people that are cross-disciplinary. [Valve developer] Ken Birdwell is a fine-artist that taught himself to program. He did the skeletal animations for our games starting all the way back from Half-Life 1.

The interesting thing is, that approach leaves you with so many avenues to go down. And as stretched as you are with resources, I have no idea why you donít hire 50 new people to get more done.Well, weíll hire anyone who walks through the door who can pass our review process. The problem is very few people can do that successfully.

In other words, we donít say theyíre working on project X and it will ship in three years.

Itís a very different environment than normal. A lot of the time our new hires ask us, how do decisions get made? How do you pick which projects to work on? People think there must be some secret cabal somewhere in the company thatís making all these decisions. But after about six months in they get it.

What about when youíre in full production though? What about when you have six months before a project is released?And so people pick up their shovels and start digging. Since everybody gets used to this idea and no one tells them what to do, everybody gets used to this idea of picking whatís best for them to work on

After Half-Life 2 you had openly discussed the health and wellbeing of your staff, and how you were going to attack this problem by adopting a less intense episodic production model. During that five-year Half-Life 2 project, did you personally feel a sense of impact you were having on your teamsí health?Oh, absolutely. Iíve become obsessed with this issue now. In fact thatís why weíre all going to Hawaii in a week.We do it every year.

Am I right in thinking there have been two attempts in changing the way Valve works since Half-Life 2? The first being the episodic model, the latest being the Ďentertainment as a service modelí?Yeah weíre thinking of this all now as entertainment as a service.

Is Facebook a viable platform for Valve?We tend to think of things in terms of our customers, so if our customer is a heavy Facebook user, we have to think about how Team Fortress 2 or Portal 2 can be better for that customer.So when we look at Facebook we see a collection of services, and a lot of our customers there, so whatís the useful thing we could do for them.The point is, too many of our customers use Facebook for us to ignore it. The same way too many of our customers have iPhones and Android phones for us to ignore it.

And that's just from ONE interview with gabe. Seriously, read what the guy is actually saying, don't take my word for anything. HE is the one (not me) that used the word "obsessed" when talking about employee health. HE is the one (not me) that said they switched to episodic development for employee health reasons, and now are going to entertainment as a service model. I usually don't bother to quote all this since it becomes a wall of text, and instead just paraphrase, but here you go, from the mouth of gabe (aka valve) himself.